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Yahoo Reportedly Prohibits Email With Porn Links

Lila GrayJul 16, 2013 4:15 PM PDT

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — A Yahoo Mail user reported that he was unable to send a porn link to himself, receiving a bounceback email citing potential “characteristics that Yahoo Mail will not accept for policy reasons,” the Consumerist said.

The user — identified as Reader Raven — voiced his dissatisfaction in an email to the Consumerist that reads, “Yahoo is now, after having done some heinous upgrades that make the email website literally no longer even work and completely ignoring the literal thousands of complaints about it on user voice, is now refusing to send porn … even though this is a link I sent to myself.

“What’s even worse then (sic) that is that I have literally never seen a porn-blocking software that does not also block an insane amount of things that are unrelated to porn.”

XBIZ, curious to test Raven’s single-experiment assertion, created a dummy Yahoo Mail account and found that three self-addressed emails containing porn links made it to their destination unfettered.

However, explicit email subject lines like “PORN” and “Porn Link XXX” elicited an automatic “verification” process, in which we had to prove that we weren't robots by typing out a few garbled numbers and letters.

After a lag period, the emails arrived in our inbox; the email we sent titled “pics” that contained a porn link was processed immediately.

Lack of error message and bounceback notwithstanding, the automatic verification process was clearly tied to the usage of the term “porn” in the body or the subject line.

Porn sites are subjected to other forms of e-discrimination: website information service Quantcast.com denies XXX sites a traffic ranking although it provides general stats for all content.